Fleapit revisited:A House Made Of Splinters.

"Our shelter is a house full of sorrow but hope still flickers here"

The "Priyut", in eastern Ukraine, is a large shelter for children whose parents can't care for them. When pro-Russian separatists invaded the Donbas in 2014 a "contact line" was created on the new, forced, and disputed, border. That contact line was, understandably, regularly breached. The Priyut stands just twelve miles from it.

In Simon Lereng Vilmont's fly-on-the-wall documentary film A House Made Of Splinters (BBC4, part of the station's Storyville strand) we get to look inside the Priyut. We get to see the work of carers like Mrs Irina and Mrs Anjelika and we get to see the lives of some of the kids. Most prominently cat loving Eva, Kolya, and Sasha.

They range from toddlers to teenagers and they act like any other children you may know. They blow bubbles, they take teddy bears to bed, they tell each other scary stories, they cry, they fight, they floss, and they watch Peppa Pig. They're in the Priyut for many reasons. Perhaps they've suffered violence at home, perhaps they'd otherwise be homeless, perhaps their parents are alcoholics.

In fact it is alcohol that seems to be the major reason the kids are in the home and it's a constant thread throughout A House Made Of Splinters. We see Eva crying because her mum's always drunk. When she phones her mum to talk to her, her mum - surely inebriated - suggests Eva runs away from the Priyut and that's one of the kindest things she says to her.

We hear young boys telling each other stories about their drunken dads assaulting their partners and when Sasha, who is as adorable as Eva, makes a best friend in Alina, the two of them, not yet into double figures age wise, share stories of how often they've tried alcohol themselves.

Sasha's mum's often so drunk that Sasha has been left alone at home for days. She's had to cook and care for herself. Now she's in the Priyut, her mum's not bothering to visit her or even phone her. Sasha's friendship with Alina is very touching to behold but is underpinned by the sadness of knowing that it cannot last forever. Kids are only allowed to stay at the Priyut for nine months.

We see staff trying to find foster parents for the kids and we even see Sasha's prospective foster parent visit Sasha for the first time. Kolya's situation is much the same as Eva's and Sasha's but he's got a few years on them. He often runs away from home, regularly gets in trouble with the police, and has scars on his lower arm that would be consistent with self-harming.

He also talks as if he's an old lag who's done more porridge than the three bears. He's in the Priyut with two younger siblings, Zhenya and Kristina, and the affection and love between the three of them is both palpable and incredibly endearing. But, underneath this mask of toughness, Kolya is still just a kid. A kid who's been denied his mother's love and is in a great deal of pain.

We see children, very young children, acting out the drunken violence they've witnessed their own parents enact and, in this, we see how the pain we inflict on little infants is something they will often carry with them for the rest of their lives. Sometimes it will take generations to heal.

We see one kid in tears because his dad hasn't bothered to visit him and we see other small children being lectured on preliminary court hearings and subpoenas. Things small children really shouldn't need to learn about.

Joy comes in the form of the carers. They feed the kids, keep them warm, make sure they go to school, play games with them, and, possibly most importantly of all, make them smile and show them the love that's been withheld from them by those who should love them the very most.

There's a really moving scene when the kids open up their Christmas presents and then put on a Christmas performance for Mrs Irina and Mrs Anjelika and when one child joyfully moves in with her grandparents it fills the viewer with hope. As a quote at the end of the film has it:- "hope dies last".

What we don't see, and is barely mentioned, in the whole of A House Made of Splinters is the war. It's an unspoken presence. A caption at the end of the film tells us a horrible truth we already know. That on the 24th February 2022, nearly twelve months ago, Putin sent the Russian army into Ukraine. We don't find out what's happened to the kids and the carers in the Priyut since then and we can have no idea what will happen to them in the future. Hope dies last.